Goofs for
Strangers on a Train (1951)

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• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: There are two tennis balls on the court when Guy is warming up, but they are gone when the game starts.
  
  
• Continuity: When Guy is on the train returning to Metcalf (after the tennis match) you can see over his shoulder that the sun has almost completely set - but the next scene shows Bruno (in line to go back to the island) looking up to see the full sun in the sky.
  
  
• Continuity: When Guy is in Bruno's house, the beam of the flashlight is not consistent between the shot of Guy looking at the map, and the upward shot of Guy looking around to get his bearings.
  
  

• Continuity: When Miriam's glasses drop to the ground as Bruno strangles her, they land softly on the grass and don't break. However after the struggle, when he reaches down to pick them up they are seen to be cracked in one of the lenses.
  
  
• Continuity: During the initial conversation on the train, Bruno's cigarette vanishes from his mouth mid-sentence.
  
  
• Continuity: Tennis match played before the end of the movie is clearly put together from 2 different games - you can see those are different tennis courts and also stadiums.
  
  
• Continuity: When Bruno is kicking Guy on the merry-go-round, he is not holding the cigarette lighter, but when he dies, he has it in his hand.
  
  
• Continuity: In Bruno's house, the dog on the top of the stairs has stiff ears. That one which licks the Guy's hand in close-up, differently, has flexible ears.
  
  
• Continuity: As Bruno approaches the fairground, following Miriam, the position of his hands changes between shots, from clasped behind his back, to lighting a cigarette.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: A crew member is reflected in the car door when the two detectives get out of the car at the station they have chased Guy to.
  
  
• Continuity: The hand that grasps the cigarette lighter in the drain has shorter fingernails than Bruno's hand, as is evident when Bruno's hand is opened in the final fairground scene.
  
  
• Errors in geography: When Bruno takes a taxi from the Anthony house in Arlington, Virginia, to travel to Union Station in Washington, the taxi crosses a bridge over the Potomac River, which separates Virginia and Washington, D.C. The taxi is crossing the bridge in the wrong direction, because the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument (located in D.C.) are shown through the rear window of the taxi.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Turley and the detective follow Guy to the station, they see him at the ticket booth. As they carry on to follow him, several people in the background walking through the station and going up the escalator can be seen looking and pointing towards the camera and crew.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Guy arrives in Metcalf to head off Bruno, he walks up to a taxi and tells the driver, "Amusement park -- quick," but the line has clearly been dubbed by a different actor.
  
  
• Continuity: When Bruno arrives at the Metcalf train station with the cigarette lighter in hand, a background sign for "Ray's Danbury Diner - Low Prices" can be glimpsed in the background. (The scene was filmed at the Danbury train station.) A minute later, the sign reads "Ray's Metcalf Diner".
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Guy says "Oh, excuse me" after accidentally bumping Bruno's foot in the opening scene in the train's club car, his voice has plainly been dubbed by another actor.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the detectives lose Guy outside the Forest Hills tennis stadium, they are shown standing on a curb, with a black car parked down the street behind them, before Hennesey dashes out across the street and flags down another vehicle. When he jumps in and asks the woman in the back seat to let them follow Guy's cab, the same street and parked black car are seen through that vehicle's rear window, even though that car was plainly stopped coming from a different street and a different direction.
  
  

• Audio/visual unsynchronized: SPOILER: As Bruno is hurrying back to his boat after strangling Miriam on the island, he passes other couples laying on the grass as the voices of Miriam's boyfriends are heard calling for her. When the boys find her dead and begin shouting for help, these bystanders jump up in alarm and react to their cries. But many of them jump up several seconds earlier, while the boyfriends are still heard playfully calling Miriam, clearly because the soundtrack and the film were not matched and edited properly.
  
  

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